Many systems (e.g., blade servers or cellular servers) utilize partitions, which separate the system into individual sections, to allow for the operation of multiple operating systems within the system. Partitions include two major categories: soft partitions and hard partitions. Hard partitions are implemented at the board level by separating the system into physically independent partitions, which isolate the multiple operating systems both logically and electrically. Soft partitions are implemented at the processing core level by allocating server resources (e.g., CPU and memory usage) to each partition, which provides functional, but not electrical, isolation of the multiple operating systems.
A partition may have various services running within it. Services operating within the partition may need to request information and/or configuration changes from other partitions of the system. In the past, these requests were executed without security domain access controls or logging the requests. However, with the increased awareness of system security, authentication of the service is needed before authorizing execution of a request and/or logging an audit trail entry.